Yankees: Aaron Judge Reportedly Healthy and Ready for July Opening Day

Yankees star Aaron Judge may be ready to go for a late-July 2020 MLB season.

With “good news” items few and far between, we’d certainly forgive Yankees fans for treating this latest report with a degree of skepticism.

But shortly before the MLBPA officially rejected the league’s final 60-game proposal, clearing the path for MLB to set a schedule of…60 games, former GM Jim Bowden dropped the Yankees injury update we’ve spent many moons waiting for.

Not only does Aaron Hicks appear to be heathy and fully recovered from offseason Tommy John surgery, but his outfield running mate Aaron Judge will reportedly be beside him if 10,000 other factors all conspire to allow the 2020 season to open in late July.

You can exhale…a little bit, New York.

Last we heard, Judge still wasn’t swinging a bat in late May following his Spring Training (remember that?) shutdown, leading many of us to believe his painful broken rib hadn’t progressed much during his significant chunk of downtime. However, the latest leak indicates that, even though we haven’t seen it, Judge hasn’t faced any other setbacks.

We haven’t heard anything about a follow-up MRI, either, which was a significant sticking point throughout much of the coronavirus shutdown.

For a while, while Yankees insiders remained silent on Judge, it seemed Hicks might be stealing the headlines solo, standing out as the first MLB player to ever miss zero games following Tommy John, a joyous quirk of this extended MLB absence. Hicks sent a BP video from George Steinbrenner Field (in one of its final operational days), and stated he was good to go back on June 20.

The Yankees could have Aaron Judge and Aaron Hicks back in the Bronx.

If the Yankees are going to make the run they’d hoped for in 2020 during a 60-game sprint, they’re going to have to minimize catastrophic injuries in a way they haven’t done in recent years. The coronavirus may make a season altogether impossible in more ways than one, with the type of start-stop training necessary lending itself to the creation of more maladies.

Luckily, though, we can finally bathe in happy Judge rumors for the time being, deluding ourselves into ignoring the…whole rest of the league’s mess.